U.K. smart storage startup Moixa Energy Holdings Ltd. has raised £4.6 million ($5.8 million) of funding and aims to raise another £10 million by the end of the year, as it prepares to expand its energy storage management platform across the U.S. and Europe, GreenTechMedia reports.
Japanese conglomerate and battery maker Itochu, which is Moixa’s partner in the Japanese market, led the Series C funding round.
Japan is currently the largest market for Moixa’s artificial intelligence-based GridShare platform. Moixa claims the Itochu storage assets it oversees make up the largest managed fleet of residential batteries in the world.
Moixa’s recent growth in Japan has been rapid: its GridShare software now supports more than 22,000 storage systems in the country, having only hit the 10,000-unit mark in November 2019. In other words, GridShare now orchestrates more batteries in Japan than were installed across the whole of California as of the end of 2019.
“We are on an exponential trajectory. […] The next step is 50,000 or 100,000 [batteries under management] and then millions,” founder and CEO Simon Daniel told GTM.
Compared to other virtual power plant or energy management systems, the GridShare technology has a deeper relationship with the smart appliances it connects to, Daniel said. The platform has a higher awareness of a customer’s needs and is reconfigured as regulatory conditions change, he said.
For example, if a Japanese customer’s postal code is issued a typhoon warning, GridShare flips their battery into backup mode rather than charging an EV. The country’s 10-year solar export tariffs, established in 2009, are running out for many Japanese households, and GridShare can switch to prioritizing self-consumption instead of exporting power when that happens.
The entire Itochu fleet can now be dialed up or down by as much as 70 megawatts, similar to a small pumped hydro system, only distributed across the network.